The crowd surrounding the main ring in the cow palace is visibly restless when the veterinarian enters the ring with a microphone. He has appeared from the opening of a black and gold curtain, behind which, we all presume, they are still keeping the pregnant cow. Bovine birth, the vet explains to us, like human birth, is not an exact science. All together now, the crowd lets out a groan. It is nearly five o’clock and some families have been seated in the stands for an hour already. People are starting to get hungry. Madame Moo (that's the cow’s name) has been administered some sort of medicine which should speed up the process, but, according to the young man standing in the middle of the dirt ring, the calf’s actual breach could still be a couple of hours away.
At this disheartening news, families with children begin to work their way down the small bleachers and out the pavilion doors. I leave my spot, standing between two sets of seats, to head outside for some fresh air and a beer.
It is Labor Day, the last day of the state fair—the last day of summer. The knights of the Boumi Temple have bought out a tent slip next to the Super Shot ride and are selling beer in plastic cups for a couple of bucks each. My cell phone has been quiet since I got to the fairgrounds, but I pull it out anyway and check to see if I have missed Madeline’s call. I have been expecting to hear from her for some time now, but so far the phone has been only dead weight in the pocket of my pants.
I hand the man working the booth a five and grab two cups before heading over to watch kids load up on the ride. The Super Shot is new this year and is apparently a big hit. The line weaves all the way through the fenced-in corral and back almost to where I am standing. All told, the ride lasts less than a minute. Twelve people are strapped in, and their seats are pulled six stories, straight up, to the top of the tower, where they are released to freefall until a set of brakes grinds them to a stop before they hit the ground.
The carney running the show has held up the line so that he can turn on the tower lights; he has got the most amazing haircut I have seen in my nearly three decades on this earth. His head looks like there is a Davey Crockett coonskin hat growing right out of the top of it, all shaved around the back and sides with a long ponytail hanging down, from the tuft on top. He plugs in an industrial-size cord and flips a switch, and the tower comes to life. Multi-colored lights glow against the darkening sky. Behind the Super Shot, the lights come up on the Tilt-a-Whirl and then the Swings, and finally, up the center of the Giant Ferris Wheel and out the spokes.
I finish up the first beer and put the second full cup inside the empty. So entranced am I by the fair coming to life that I don't even notice that the line for the ride has reached back to me and even a few people have started lining up behind me. A woman standing next to me asks if I'll ride with her five-year-old son. She has on this low cut black shirt and the white ridges of her breasts are peaking up at me. She must be a half-decade younger than I am, much too young to have a boy this old already.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m not riding. Just watching.”
She holds out a couple of extra tickets for me and explains she was going to go with him, but the sign up front says she can't ride since she is pregnant. Looking down, I notice a bit of a belly poking out, which I hadn't seen at first glance. The kid standing next to her is missing both his front teeth. He is wearing an obscene shirt that I recognize from my high school days, which, in no uncertain terms, is bragging about the size of his manhood.
I say, “Sure, what the hell.” The kid watches our spot in line while I grab two more plastic cups of beer. When I get back his mom has wandered off a little ways with two other girls her age and is watching a man guess weights and birth months. She looks back over her shoulder at us and mouths something that I can't read, so I just lift up one of the beers and nod.
The kid is looking up at me but I don't have any idea what you talk to a five-year-old about. “You gonna go see the cow give birth?” I ask him.
Madame Moo is the main attraction tonight. Every day of the fair the 4-H club puts on some sort of exhibit. Some days they are auctioning off cattle, or judging goats and sheep. They give prizes for the biggest squash or the smallest green beans. Even with it only being the end of August they are giving out blue ribbons in a competition for the best Christmas trees. Today’s theme is birth. Next to the main exhibit ring there is a pen where a mammoth pig is kept with eight piglets, which alternate between sleeping under a heat lamp and suckling on her brown teats. Next to the pigpen is a glass incubator where baby chicks are hatching out of rows of white eggs.
But Madame Moo is the one bringing in the crowds. Most of the people at the fair aren't farm folk, and, apparently, to see a baby calf slip out of the hind end of a cow is just too much for some people to pass up - myself included. The food vendors around the Cow Palace are working double-time tonight as people scarf down sausage links and funnel cake at a feverish pace, all the while keeping a wary eye on the main ring, waiting for the appearance of the engorged beast.
The kid responds by shaking his head from side to side, “Mom says it is going to be too bloody for me.” He is looking down at the ground now and kicking the heel of his shoe against the asphalt. I wonder if I have disappointed him. The line for the Super Shot inches forward bit by bit.
“Well, I think your mom is right,” I tell him. “I have a son your age and his mom and I aren't going to let him watch it either.”
This is a lie, but he looks back up at me and shows me the gap in the front of his teeth. He seems comforted now, knowing that if he is, in fact, missing out on some monumental moment at least he isn't alone. By now we are closing in on the front of the line, working our way through the holding area, and the boy is starting to really check out what he has gotten himself into. I'm glad that the moment has passed and he has not pressed me anymore on the subject, or asked why I'm not riding with my own boy.
It was not a complete lie. If Madeline hadn’t mixed Cherry Coke with supermarket drain cleaner and drank enough of it down, our boy would have turned six this summer.
Recently, my thoughts have been on this child, and I find it easiest to think of him the way you would remember, now and again, a friend who has moved to the other side of the world. Has he changed much? Does he still have the ability to make me laugh at the simplest of things? Has this new world he is living in changed him so completely that I would not even recognize him if we passed on the street?
My father has an extensive collection of old Squirt lemon-drink merchandise that he collected as a child and keeps hanging on the walls of the house where I grew up. For Halloween once I dressed up as the Squirt boy; I wore a green shirt and red pants, and used a whole can of my father’s hair mousse to do up my blonde locks into the perfect pompadour. My father had taken one look at me and laughed. Lately sometimes, when I visit him, I wonder if my boy would have looked anything like the Squirt boy with his round face, little ears, and big dark eyes.
I guess we could have easily had a daughter. She would have been black Irish like her mother, but, of course, with more of the dark brown in her hair than her mother’s rusty auburn, and with a softer face, too, which would have dissipated through the generations until the Irish side was indeterminable.
I know that boy or girl had been decided in the moments just after we finished, laying next to one another, trying to match our breathing, in the dark. But, in less than a month's time, with the whole mess inside of her not yet deciding to become much more than a jumble of cells, Maddy had made up her mind.
On that day, my phone had been turned off during a lunch with an old college professor who was mentoring me towards the publication of my first book. The novel was still in what I called the prep phase. This had become a point of contention lately, in that as much as I called myself a writer, the profession has yet to reap the sort of rewards one could raise a family upon. The message on my phone said simply that Maddy was in the hospital. It didn't come through until nearly an hour after it was placed.
When I made it to her room, the intravenous tubes were already straining; pulled taught as Madeline retched into a receptacle next to her bed. Her body shook violently, as if the tubes were pumping her full of electrical current, and I stood in the doorway imagining that I could hear her body breaking.
Some time later a doctor in green emergency room scrubs found me on a waiting room sofa and told me Maddy was sleeping. The drain cleaner had racked her body so hard. She had torn her muscle lining, and she had bled a lot.
No one had been at the house with her that day, and as much as the doctor’s could surmise she had waited until a fog of unconsciousness was almost upon her before calling the ambulance. The poison had worked its way deep inside of her by then. Yet she had held on, and they had worked enough of it out of her system to be confident that, in time, she would be herself again.
It is surprising how fast humankind can put things in the past, or at least put on a show that they have. Like a spring storm where the thunder comes in hard, and big wet drops rain down on your roof until you worry that they'll come right in through the shingles. And then the sun is out and the puddles, which formed out of nowhere, are steaming up off the driveway.
I've got a good buzz going when our turn finally comes and the ride attendant straps the boy and me into the Super Shot seats. The boy’s mother has come around to our side and is waving at her son who is playing brave, but when the ride begins to jerk upwards I can see his grip tighten on the shoulder restraint.
My flip-flop falls off while I am looking up and trying to gauge how much higher we have to go.
“Well, shit,” is all I can manage as I shrug at the boy, but he never hears me. His eyelids are pulled back as far as they can go and he is watching my sandal whirly-bird back down to the ground.
A couple of seconds later we reach the top and after that we are all screaming like hell until the brakes catch us, and the seats screech to a halt at the bottom. The boy is out of his seat and down bragging to his mom before I can get the straps unbuckled. She mouths thank you for the both of them and I shoot her a wink. Old Davey Crockett, with the coonskin-hat haircut, is smiling when I ask him for my flip-flop. And, although I can see it sitting on the control panel behind him, he gives me the old “Flip-flop? What flip-flop,” bit. I chuckle at him like we are old chums and he claps me on the shoulder and hands it over.
Heading for the beer tent, I check my phone again for Madeline’s call, but there's still nothing. There is no way that she is still with the doctor, but I know better than try to call her.
She has been adamant about going to these appointments by herself. A calendar hangs on our refrigerator, and appointment days are called marked simply Maddy's Day. In the morning while she puts lotion on her legs I tell her she looks nice, and tell her to enjoy a milkshake for me, and to go easy on the shopping because her closet is nearly full of shoes as it is. And when I leave the room I kick myself for being such a cliché.
Every time she goes, the doctor tells her that everything inside of her is fine now, and that these things take some time. But in her mind two years of trying is some time plus a couple of months.
In bed, with the lights off and her head resting on my chest, Maddy said she couldn't feel anything inside of her anymore. Me included. We'd been quiet for a while before this comment and several minutes passed before she said that it felt like throwing pennies into an old stone well, and waiting, but not hearing a splash. I felt at that moment like I had to say something profoundly comforting, but nothing came to me. I could think of no response for her, no words that might help her rest, so I let my face go slack, allowed my breathing to slow, and pretended that I was asleep.
Something is brewing in the cow palace and the crowds are starting to leave the picnic tables and head inside. I hand my last five-dollar bill over to the man working the counter and grab my change and one last sipper before following the families inside. A veterinarian in green scrubs is leading Madame Moo into the ring with a braided rope bridle. A second vet follows with a wireless microphone.
To me, pregnancy looks the same no mater what the species. I had a tank of freshwater fish as a boy with a couple of black mollies in it. One guppy swelled and swelled until something finally gave and a whole mess of swimming black dots spilled out of her.
Madame Moo is standing in the middle of the ring waiting for something to give.
“The contractions started up short while ago,” the vet with the microphone says. “She is almost fully dilated and the calf should be here any minute.”
I take a long sip of beer and lean up against the side of one of the sets of bleachers. A man next to me whispers to his wife that they'll probably take the calf away from her as soon as it's born for veal. His wife closes her eyes and shakes her head slowly from side to side.
Madame Moo lets out a groan and, although the calf is supposed to come out head first, we all see two black hooves. A bald man with too-short pants is behind the cow with a video camera, which is hooked up to a big projection screen. The cow stomps her back leg and on the screen the stumps of two legs are now unmistakable.
Over the loud speaker the vet informs us, “Just like in humans, sometimes the baby gets turned around and things don’t come out like we expected…”
The cameraman comes around to the front of the cow, getting out of the way of two more veterinarians who appear from behind the curtain. On the screen, Madame Moo’s eyes bulge, and her tongue hangs out her mouth as she strains.
One of the new vets has brought out a set of chains with two padded cuffs on the end. Together the two vets work quickly to get the cuffs hooked onto the calf’s hooves.
“…During a breach birth, sometimes we have to step in and give the mother a hand.”
Madame Moo is straining on the television, and behind her the two vets are pulling on the chains with every contraction. Everyone is on the edge of their seats as the hind end and a wet tail come out. The vets pull a black and white body out next, and things seem to stop for a second. Madame Moo bellows. The vets pull hard; the armpits of their scrubs have turned dark green. A head pops free and the front legs slide out. The calf drops to the hay. Everyone around me cheers like hell.
One of the vets drops his chain and runs to snip the umbilical cord and clamp it off. Madame Moo turns around and begins to lick her new calf with long strokes to get the circulation going. The cameraman is focused on the calf. On the screen, partially obscured by the vets, the calf's small body shivers and shudders.
The night I pretended to be asleep, Madeline rolled away from me, pulled her knees up to her chest and rocked back and forth. I watched her through a squinted eye until she finally fell quiet and sleep came to her. I reached my hand out to rub her naked back, but when I got close enough I felt a hairy tingling, like when a fingertip builds up static electricity, and I worried that if I touched her I would electrocute the both of us.
When I finally fell asleep for real I had a dream that I was being chased through my father's house, but I couldn't tell who was chasing me. On the walls, all of the picture frames were empty; all of the photographs were gone. Although my body was that of a man nearly thirty I felt inside like a boy again. So I ran to my father's old study for help, but he wasn't there; his bookshelf was covered with dust and the arms of his desk chair had cobwebs in the rails. So I allowed myself to be chased upstairs, where I ran to the doorway of my childhood room to hide under the covers. But when I opened the door I realized that I was already in there, already hiding, but now I was old; a man of nearly eighty with loose skin and fragile bones. And I was scared, because I was all alone, and there was no one else left.
“It’s a boy,” the veterinarian with the microphone announces as the other vets back away and disappear behind the curtain. “And, all things considered, he looks great.” The crowd applauds again, but already people are moving towards the door. The show is over. It is getting late and people have work tomorrow. Madame Moo’s head is still bowed; her tongue is still working across the length of the calf’s wet body.
I pitch my empty plastic cup under the bleacher but I cannot tear myself away from it all. Madame Moo sighs a little bit but does not seem to notice the little bit of blood and matter that comes out of her backside. Most of the crowd is gone now, but the voice is still chattering away to the few of us who remain. It is quick to inform us that the bleeding is normal, that birth is not always as tidy as we expect it to be; a little blood and a little gore are always a natural part of it.
Madame Moo will ignore the voice from the loudspeakers; ignore the last of us few stragglers. She will continue to lick her new calf from hip to crown, coaxing the blood to circulate under the skin. I will stay and watch—that is, until the veterinarians come to take the calf away, and only the mother remains.
